Ah, the infamous Exercise of Vital Powers. The first draft of this script was JMS's revenge for a trick played by Andreas at a convention.

The episode did well considering how much exposition there was in it on top of having to reestablish the Garibaldi/Lise connection. What always struck me about it was the utter coldness of both Wade and Edgars.

Edgars is awesome.
I remember once watching an episode where Edgars and Garibaldi were doing a big exposition dialogue about the telepath virus/antidote and such, and I'm such a sucker for the politicking and plotting and planning in well-written fiction, and my roommate, kinda half-watching it out of context, blurts out, "This is so BORING!"

and my roommate, kinda half-watching it out of context, blurts out, "This is so BORING!"

This is not about this episode, but following the tangent of roommates sorta half watching because they happen to be in the room.

My old housemate is something of an SF fan, but hadn't yet been really hooked by B5. He had been in the room a reasonable amount of the time when was watching, by hadn't had it complete grab him so that it wasn't just background noise while he was reading the newspaper (or whatever). (Although to be fair, he was gradually starting pay a little more attention to the show as time went on.)

Then came the episode when Refa visits B5 and Londo gives him the first half of the two stage poison. In particular, Londo had the line:

"Only an idiot fights a war on two fronts. Only the heir to the throne of the kingdom of idiots fights a war on twelve fronts."

He about fell out of his chair laughing. He is a big military history buff, and he has very biting, sarcastic sense of humor. That line just completely struck a chord with with him. That was the point at which he got hooked, started really watching without reading at the same time, and started asking multiple questions to fill in pieces of relevent backstory that he had missed.

Yep: Different strokes.
Different people get hooked (or not) by different little details.

Edgars is awesome.
I remember once watching an episode where Edgars and Garibaldi were doing a big exposition dialogue about the telepath virus/antidote and such, and I'm such a sucker for the politicking and plotting and planning in well-written fiction, and my roommate, kinda half-watching it out of context, blurts out, "This is so BORING!"

Eh, different strokes.

I don't like Edgars.

__________________
Since light travels faster than sound, some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

This episode is exposition-heavy, that's for sure. If the dialogues between Edgars and Garibaldi actually revealed something new, they would be more interesting, but they basically tie up elements we already know.

Garibaldi's voice-over at various points, always starting with the word "Mars", is an interesting technique used in this episode.

Orange juice again! Why is it that it's the caviar and champagne of the future?! First Sheridan's obsession with oranges, now Edgars. The latter is definitely an interesting character - a combination of gentle husband, seemingly compassionate human, and ice-cold opportunist who will walk over corpses to get what he wants.

I like this one. I actually never found it to be too overly dialogue-ey. This is slower than the last episode, but not necessarily less tense. There's a lot of creepy stuff going on. Something unpleasant is about to happen with the Shadow-implanted telepaths, but we don't yet know what it is. There's a LOT of creepiness with Edgars/Wade/Garibaldi.

Obviously I can't like Edgars as a person, but I really do like the character. He is perfect as the evil powerful businessman. He didn't have to care much about Clark's shenanigans until that point because none of that stuff affected him in his position of power. Now he's worried, and he's got the resources to do something about it.

I find it interesting that Garibaldi is able to find Sheridan's father when Clark's people can't. I think it tells us something about medical privacy laws in the Babylon 5 universe It's also interesting that there's only the one member of Sheridan's family anyone ever cares about. What about his mother? What about the sister who even had her own episode (well, not really. But still, it's a well-established character).